This invention relates to vehicles with safety devices to protect pedestrians who collide with the vehicle.
Collision often tends to knock the pedestrian off his feet so that he lands on the bonnet of the vehicle, and some known safety devices comprise a member which is normally stowed and relatively unobtrusive. When a collision is sensed, this member rises to an operating position in which it forms a barrier around the bonnet, to prevent the victim who has landed there from falling off again.
In principle, such devices have many advantages. Many statistics now suggest that the pedestrian victims of vehicle collision suffer injuries as serious from falling off the vehicle onto the road as from initially hitting and landing upon the vehicle. However, tests with the known safety devices have shown that it is difficult to reconcile reliable operation of the device and acceptable styling of a vehicle such as a motor-car. In particular, although the known designs of vehicles and safety devices have worked well with fully-grown pedestrians, it has proved more difficult to ensure that children and other small, but typical, pedestrians strike the vehicle in a way that causes them to fall upon the bonnet, and to design the device and time its rise so that it does not adversely affect the desired trajectory of the victim onto the bonnet after collision.